Karen Anderson is a writer, artist and zine publisher from California, U.S.A.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Karen Anderson produced The Zed, a mimeographed fanzine made for the Spectator Amateur Press Society (SAPS). This was a long-running small publication, with some issues consisting of just six pages, as was the tradition with many Apazines.

The Zed was short for Die Zeitschrift für Vollstandige Unsinn translated as The Journal for Utter Nonsense.

In the 1950s, Karen Anderson spotted a typo in a fanzine while reading an essay by Lee Jacobs on folk music, where he had mistyped "folk" as "filk". In her words, "Who ever heard of a filk? Since the essay appeared in an amateur publication circulated among science fiction fans, though, there was only one thing to do. Rather than waste a phrase like "filk song", something must be created to which the name could be applied." There had been songs written by science fiction fans since the 1940s, but Anderson's new name for them caught on, and she is created with naming "filk songs".